The medical imaging benefits from the advances in constructiveapproximation, orthogonal polynomials, Fourier and numerical analysis,statistics and other branches of mathematics. At the same time, the needs of the medical diagnostic technology pose new mathematical challenges. This talk surveys a few problems, some of them related to approximation theory, that have appeared in my collaboration with specialists studying some pathologies of the human eye, in particular, of the cornea, such as:- reconstruction of the shape of the cornea from the data collected bykeratoscopes- implementation of simple indices of corneal irregularity- fast and reliable computation of the through-focus characteristics of a human eye.